PhD Position for Microaggressions in Engineering Programs

Posted on by

The research is motivated by the persistently low representation of gender and racial minorities in engineering education and seeks to study the subtle behaviors, or microaggressions, that students experience in engineering programs. While microaggressions are especially frequent among minority students, their influence on student success and persistence in engineering programs has been understudied. This research investigates the effect of microaggressions on the experiences of engineering students and compares them in the context of a predominantly white institutions (Iowa State University) and a historically black college (North Carolina A&T). The project will contribute to diversifying engineering programs through increased awareness of the subtle behaviors that engineering students experience in college. Creating an environment where minority students feel safe and included allow educating a competitive workforce which will ultimately positively impact our society by incorporating the needs and perspectives of all student groups.

Using an intersectional perspective that considers race and gender identities as unique identities, this research asks “How do gender and race microaggressions affect students’ success and persistence in engineering programs?” To answer this question, this research proposes to address four primary goals: (1) identify gender and race microaggressions experienced by engineering students who identify as White men, White women, African-American men, African-American women, Latino men, Latina women, Asian men and Asian women; (2) build a gender and race microaggressions psychometric scale based on two institutional contexts; (3) test the relationship between gender and race microaggressions and success and persistence indicators (self-efficacy, institutional affiliation, psychological well-being and academic performance) in the context of a PWI and a HBCU; and (4) contrast and compare student experiences with gender and race microaggressions within and across the two institutional contexts. The research advances the body of knowledge on microaggressions by identifying the real stories of students who experience them and by building measures of gender and race microaggressions. Importantly, this project clarifies that microaggressions need to be studied from an intersectional perspective and consider students’ unique identity based on both race and gender. Additionally, the study advances knowledge regarding institutional contexts (PWI vs. HBCU) for students’ experiences with microaggressions.

The award supporting this PhD position can be found here.

IJESJP Call for Submissions

Posted on by

Dear ESJP community,

We hope this message finds all of you well. As you may remember from the 2018 conference in San Diego, there is a new editorial staff for IJESJP, with publishing options in both English and Spanish. Starting in 2019 we are planning to publish 2 issues per year (be on the lookout for a Call For Proposals in the next few weeks). In the meantime, if you have papers ready or almost-ready to go, we will be publishing a December 2018 (English) issue as well and welcome your submissions! The journal remains focused on engineering theory and practice that extends social justice and peace throughout the world and can be accessed here: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/IJESJP/about.

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions,
Shehla Arif – shehla.arif at gmail.com
Andrea Evelyn Haverkamp – haverkaa at oregonstate.edu
Mira Olson – mso28 at drexel.edu

Postdoc Position at USD

Posted on by

Interested in revolutionizing engineering education to include social justice?

Please consider joining us at the University of San Diego in California!
Title: Post Doctoral Research Associate (Social Science/STS/Engineering Ed Research Associate)
Deadline: (open until filled, for best consideration, please submit by July 26)

The Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering is seeking candidates for one or more years as a postdoctoral research associate to work on the National Science Foundation grant: IUSE/PFE REvolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED): “Developing Changemaking Engineers”. This position will collaborate with faculty, students, and industry partners to assist in producing and disseminating activities in and out of the university classroom in support of our model for collaborative change to redefine the “engineering canon” and develop “Changemaking Engineers”. The RED abstract can be found here.

Our School of Engineering is revolutionizing engineering education, with the aim of preparing students to innovate engineering solutions developed within a contextual framework that embeds humanitarian, sustainable and social justice approaches. It also seeks to infuse professional skills into the curriculum and align these with our institutional context. This requires an enhanced curriculum with a focus on student teamwork, a greater consideration of social and economic factors, improved communication with diverse constituents, and reflection on an ethical understanding of decisions and solutions.

Application should include: curriculum vitae, research statement/plans, and a cover letter to include a statement of how you fit with the goals of the USD NSF RED grant to develop changemaking engineers.

For more information, visit https://bit.ly/2JZgCrn.

Working with community: Critical conversations about trust

Posted on by

Calla Munda, Hankins, Sullivan County NY, June 14/16th 2018
Hosted by Caroline Baillie (USD), Eric Feinblatt (Waste for Life) with Jerry McCann (Build Up)

We propose to host a two-day conversation around practicing trust. Those of us who work with vulnerable communities know that trust is critical in co-creating programs that are equitable, participatory, and durable. It is, however, risky for communities to trust us, hard for us to determine the extent of trust we should reach out with, and difficult for us to know how to gain a necessary level of trust – indeed whether we should even aim for it at all. Following the recent Engineering, Social Justice and Peace conference (ESJP13) held in San Diego in January, 2018, participants requested the opportunity to take part in richer, extended conversations that were not circumscribed by a conference timetable or attendees. To this end, we aim to broaden the conversation and include educators, community developers, community members and peacemakers, not only those working at the interface of engineering and community. The conversation will be held in a retreat format – with no more than 15 participants – for deep reflection that can intentionally guide critical outcomes. Participants will spend two days and one night at the Standing People Together retreat, Calla Munda, (home on the hill) in Hankins, New York. We will apply forest school pedagogy and activities, and conversations will be in an outdoor studio setting. We hope to bring together a group with a wide variety of experience and interest in this topic to take our understanding to new levels.

There will be no fee for the Critical conversation retreat and we have managed to arrange accommodation at a set fee of $75 per person. The conversation will start at lunchtime on 14th and end at lunchtime on 16th.

As places are limited, we are asking for expressions of interest at this time. Please email 200 words by March 30th about your experiences related to trust in community work (cbaillie@sandiego.edu). Please accept our apologies in advance for not being able to accept all those who wish to attend.

Note: Hankins, NY is 2.5 hours NW of NYC. Transport options include flights / car rental from JFK/Newark, Scranton and Stewart International airports, also bus from Port Authority NY.

ESJP 2018 Blog

Posted on by

The organizing team of ESJP 13 want to share their ideas, thoughts and experiences of the event. To do this, we created a blog with some nice info and photos of the event. View it here. Please feel free to share your photos and notes to enrich this initiative.

ESJP 13 Conference

Posted on by

ESJP 13 – January 25-27, 2018

The Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering at the University of San Diego is delighted to host the 13th annual Engineering, Social Justice and Peace (ESJP) conference January 25th-27th 2018. This conference celebrates the commitment that USD and the Shiley-Marcos School have made through their RED (Revolutionizing Engineering Departments) program to support the development of engineering students who are “changemakers” for social justice, economic development and sustainability on a global scale.  

This year’s ESJP Conference is affiliated with The RSA.

For more information, please visit the conference website: https://usdsmse.wixsite.com/-esjp13

Call for Papers EJSP 13

Posted on by

Call for Papers
Engineering, Social Justice and Peace Conference (ESJP) 13
Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering, University of San Diego
San Diego, US
Jan 25th to 27th 2018 
Valuing and honoring our commitments

ESJP 13 at the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering, USD

The Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering at the University of San Diego is delighted to host the 13th annual Engineering, Social Justice and Peace (ESJP) conference January 25th-27th 2018. This conference celebrates the commitment that USD and the Shiley-Marcos School have made through their RED (Revolutionizing Engineering Departments) program to support the development of engineering students who are “changemakers” for social justice, economic development and sustainability on a global scale.

ESJP

ESJP was founded in 2004 by a group of academics who questioned the complex relationship that engineering has with social and environmental justice. In order to ensure that continuing and future practices were not explicitly or unwittingly supporting injustices but actively promoting justice, these founders began to discuss, with academics of other disciplines, practitioners, activists, students and local community members, what it means to be a just engineer. Since then, many individuals and groups around the globe have been attempting to enact these ideas in their engineering practice, their teaching and in their writings. In recent weeks, however, we have seen a new war on social justice. Many are dissatisfied with existing political and economic structures and an increasing poverty gap. Few know what to do about this, without causing further and unprecedented traumatic injustice. Hope of a just world seems even further away and we believe more than ever that we need to stand firm in our commitments to justice and equity. ESJP’s commitments can be found at this link.

As with all our meetings, ESJP 13 will be interdisciplinary by design and we welcome those who are able to help deconstruct our historical and current engineering practices, as well as those who are interested to work together to build alternatives. We welcome educators who wish to learn how to bring social justice to their engineering classes, together with those who are already doing so. We welcome students who wish to be socially just engineers in the future. We welcome in fact anyone, from inside or outside of academia, who values our commitments and wishes to join us on our journey. There will be no formal papers or talks at the meeting but sessions will all be engaged activities and discussions. We will also visit local community programs and see engineering and social justice in action. If you would like to contribute to the conference, please send a short abstract of up to 500 words, describing the topic for discussion, and the format required. Proposals can include any of the following structures and should be sent by email to Paula@esjp.org before June 1st 2017:

  • Workshop (engaged activities of up to one hour)
  • Panel discussion (four speakers of five min each plus discussion – one hour slot)
  • Individual paper (ten minute talk plus discussion – half hour slot)
  • Artistic contributions: poetry, theatre, interactive active art session, exhibition
  • You may also propose any other structure– be creative! Zines, photographic competitions, online events, dances etc etc

Due to our values base in social justice we wish to support access to the meeting for anyone who wishes to come and fits our aims and values. We welcome expressions of interest from those who face barriers in travelling to the conference. It is possible that we can include at least one session in Tijuana, Mexico and / or online sessions as appropriate. We will also have a sliding scale for the registration fee (cost recovery only) which will be based on ability to pay, and will be announced at a later date. 

ESJP 2016 Call for Papers

Posted on by

Annual Conference of the International Network of Engineering, Social Justice and Peace
Copenhagen, Denmark
10-12 August 2016

Call for Contributions

The Centre for Design and Innovation for Sustainable Transitions at
Aalborg University in Copenhagen (Denmark)

is honoured to host the meeting with the following themes:

· Sustainability, Social Justice and Peace: Sustainability has been on the policymaking agenda since Rio 1992 and has now regained visibility with the replacement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet in this 23-year span, sustainability efforts have fallen short of including social justice and peace, and especially considering the role of engineers in this inclusion. We invite contributions that shed light on how engineers and engineering can contribute to the SDGs particularly emphasizing aspects of social justice and peace.

· Migration and Refugees Crises: The last two years have seen sharp increases in the number of migrants and refugees fleeing from human conflict and extreme natural events (e.g., war in Syria, ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the mining disaster in Minas Gerais, Brasil, or the earthquake in Nepal). These crises pose humanitarian challenges of immediate response and long-term solutions. We invite contributions addressing the causes of the crises as well as their solutions, emphasizing the role that engineers and engineering can play in bringing social justice and peace to these challenges.

· Other topics that address the intersection of engineering and social justice/peace, including militarism and war, energy and environment, food and water systems, transportation infrastructure, bio/nano/info technologies, community engagement initiatives, engineering education for social justice/peace, and others.

Across all themes we encourage contributions that speak to root causes of social injustice – for example, capitalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and xenophobia figure prominently in the themes selected for this year’s conference. Whether the contribution focuses on analysis of injustice or in developing strategies for building a more just world, keeping root causes at the center can ensure that social justice is addressed directly.

Format: Interactive presentations, workshops, and other activities emphasizing audience engagement. We encourage participants to use active participatory methodologies with minimal use of projected slideshow presentations (e.g., Power Point, Keynote, or similar). We encourage active dialogue, discussion, and collective elaboration of presentation themes.

Proposals for participation should include a title, names and affiliations of contributors, the proposed contribution format (e.g., interactive presentation, roundtable, workshop, performance, other), and an abstract not longer than 300 words.

Deadline for submissions: 30 March 2016

Full papers are not required for participation in the conference. However, we invite interested participants to submit full papers for publication consideration in the International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace. Submissions received by 11 July 2016 will be reviewed before the conference by the Journal’s editors, who will be available at the conference to discuss your submission.

Organizers: Andrés Valderrama afvp@plan.aau.dk and Ulrik Jørgensen uljo@plan.aau.dk
Center for Design and Innovation for Sustainable Transitions
Aalborg University – Copenhagen Campus
A C Meyers Vænge 15, Copenhagen SV 2450, Denmark

ESJP 2015: Day 3

Posted on by

The conference went on the road for day 3 to a town in the nearby mountains to visit a social justice movement where engineers and engineering have played a central role. Thanks again to UPRM for the resources they provided.

  
In 1980, the  Casa Pueblo movement was founded in response to the proposal to begin large open pit mining across the width of Puerto Rico. A team of activists including artists, scientists, and engineers protested the grave consequences the mining projects would create by founding Casa Pueblo. And, after mobilizing with the community, the movement successfully stopped the open pit mining campaign. One of the leaders of the movement, Alexis Mossol-Martinez, led a presentation to the audience about the movement and its history.

  
Today, the Casa Pueblo movement is still very active. One of its objectives has always been the creation of art in support of the movement, reflecting its commitment to art, a small school for music trains children from the community.

  
Casa Pueblo also runs an amazing “Escuela de Bosque” or Forest School. Here, Casa Pueblo educates the public about the importance of the rain forest to Puerto Rico’s survival.

  
The forest was beautiful, but unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures because of the rim and my desire to keep my phone dry. When we got back to the bus, the group was soaked, but happy to have visited.

  

Day 3 was also end of the conference. The conference was my first, and it was also the first conference that I had the opportunity to critically engage the engineering practice with a community of others. I hope to come back to many more, and hopefully, to places like Mayagüez who was such a great host.